Civilians Quotes - Page 8

• It has become clear that America's civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long - relative to what we spend on the military, and more important, relative to the responsibilities and challenges our nation has around the world.

  Robert M. Gates

  Military, Responsibility, America

  Speech to U.S. Global Leadership Campaign (Washington, D.C.), July 15, 2008.

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• Hamas hides among unwitting civilians, who have no way of controlling its activities. This fact does not give Israel the right to kill innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally. Besides, murder is not "unintentional" when you know it is inevitable.

  Ilana Mercer

  Israel, Giving, Doe

  "Standing Armies Commandeered by Cowards". www.ilanamercer.com. November 23, 2012.

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• The military mind tends to be conservative, realistic and historical. The civilian mind tends to be liberal, idealistic and Utopian. Journalists, obviously, are civilians, and they tend to distrust, and to suspect, the military's motives.

  Mark Riebling

  Military, Historical, Mind

  "Rumsfeld’s Spy Unit". "To the Point" with Warren Olney, NPR, markriebling.blogs.com. October 31, 2002.

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• People talk about smart sanctions and crippling sanctions. Ive never seen smart sanctions, and crippling sanctions cripple everyone, including innocent civilians, and make the government more popular.

  Mohamed ElBaradei

  Smart, Government, People

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• Hamas is responsible and Hamas should held accountable for civilian deaths.

  Benjamin Netanyahu

  Responsible, Should, Hamas

  Source: cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com

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• Throughout history civilian populations and political rulers have talked of peace. We have never been free of war. The soldier, whose profession is war, understands that peace must be enforced by superior military might. The certainty of defeat is the only effective deterrent we can use to maintain peace. Furthermore, we can be strong without being aggressive.

  Barry Goldwater

  Strong, Military, War

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• The history of warfare has not yet enabled any army, any civilized army, the army of a democracy like Israel, to be able to deal with a ruthless terrorist enemy that uses civilians as a human shield without having some incidental civilian casualties.

  Benjamin Netanyahu

  Army, Israel, Enemy

  Source: cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com

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• A legitimate democracy cannot act against a terror organization because it is using civilians as a human shield, and therefore it should absorb attacks on its own civilians.

  Benjamin Netanyahu

  Organization, Democracy, Shields

  Source: cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com

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• The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army. ... They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it.

  Rachel Maddow

  Country, Powerful, Military

  Rachel Maddow (2012). “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power”, p.8, Broadway Books

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• the American public has been delicately insulated from the actuality of our ongoing wars. While a tiny fraction of men and women fighting our wars are deploying again and again, civilian life remains pretty much isolated in cost-free complacency.

  Rachel Maddow

  War, Fighting, Men

  Rachel Maddow (2012). “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power”, p.207, Broadway Books

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• It is the civilian part of the politics that is very, very bad, and we have to change that.

  Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

  "Talk Asia" with Veronica Pedrosa, edition.cnn.com. August 10, 2005.

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• Duarte is a moderate when it comes to civilian control of the military and curbing death squads. On economics, the man is almost a Marxist.

  Steve Forbes

  Military, Men, Squad

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• With all this talk about the supposed strain in relations [with the Soviet Union], there is an inference that somehow it is our fault. But we didn't kill Russian civilians by shooting down a civilian airplane. We didn't attempt to conquer an adjacent country to ours. We didn't walk out on negotiations and refuse to give a date for when we would resume.

  Ronald Reagan

  Country, War, Airplane

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• Israel does not target civilians. It targets the terrorists.

  Benjamin Netanyahu

  Israel, Doe, Target

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• Respecting our veterans includes providing them the ways and means they so desperately need to reintegrate into our lives and serve us again as productive members of our civilian community.

  Charles Rangel

  Mean, Our Veterans, Community

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• We're capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.

  Jo Nesbo

  Cutting, Understanding, Bombs

  Jo Nesbo (2010). “The Snowman: Harry Hole 7”, p.245, Random House

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• I investigated reported Japanese atrocities committed by the Japanese Army in Nanking and elsewhere. Verbal accounts of reliable eyewitnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility is beyond question afford convincing proof that the Japanese Army behaved and is continuing to behave in a fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns. Not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians were slaughtered, many in cold blood.

  Koki Hirota

  Fashion, Army, Blood

  "Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing". Book by Robert Sabella, p. 56, 2002.

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• The longer the war drags on, more and more civilians are getting killed.

  Sergey Akhromeyev

  War, Drag

  "Iraq Rebuffs Iran on Peace Initiative". The Washington Post, (p. A01), February 11, 1991.

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• Wars results in immediate deaths and destruction, but the environmental consequences can last hundreds, often thousands of years. And it is not just war itself that undermines our life support system, but also the research and development, military exercises and general preparations for battle that are carried out on a daily basis in most parts of the world. The majority of this pre-war activity takes place without the benefit of civilian scrutiny and therefore we are unaware of some of what is being done to our environment in the name of 'security.

  Rosalie Bertell

  Military, War, Exercise

  Rosalie Bertell (2001). “Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War”, p.2, Black Rose Books Ltd.

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• When people see the terrible scenes of violence on television, when we mourn the death of each and every American man and woman in uniform or a civilian that's killed in Iraq, that it's hard to see the progress that's being made and it's hard to believe that this is all going to come out for the better.

  Condoleezza Rice

  Believe, Men, People

  "Hardball" with Chris Matthews, www.nbcnews.com. August 7, 2006.

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• If there's no other alternative, I support civilian trials for terrorists.

  Rudy Giuliani

  Support, Alternatives, Trials

  "FOX News Sunday" with Chris Wallace, www.foxnews.com. November 15, 2009.

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• I don't think we [the USA] need more troops. I think we need to be less worried about civilian casualties.

  Ann Coulter

  Thinking, Usa, Troops

  "Hardball" with Chris Matthews, www.nbcnews.com. June 27, 2017.

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• Militarism is the most energy-intensive, entropic activity of humans, since it converts stored energy and materials directly into waste and destruction without any useful intervening fulfillment of basic human needs. Ironically, the net effect of military, as opposed to civilian, expenditures is to increase unemployment and inflation.

  Hazel Henderson

  Military, Energy, Needs

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• The Palestinians fight for their rights and their land using stones and catapults but the Israelis retaliate with disproportional and overwhelming power by using bullets and bombs thus killing so many innocent civilians

  Bernard Membe

  Fighting, Rights, Land

  "Tanzania touts Middle East peace". Daily News (dailynews.co.tz), November 30, 2010.

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• Uganda's Constitutional Court will decide whether the military court can proceed with this trial. A nation cannot claim to be operating under the rule of law if its military tribunals ignore the orders of civilian courts.

  Bill Vaughan

  Military, Order, Law

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